I was writing this post today when the news dropped that Cursor has just raised a new round.
> We’re pleased to announce a new round of financing: our Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation. We’re excited to deepen our work with existing investors, including Accel, Thrive, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST, and welcome new partners Coatue, NVIDIA, and Google.
Now I am old enough to remember when a company that approached a VC to say they were raising money for a dev tools startup would have been laughed at. Obviously that was a different time, but raising $2.3bn on a VS Code fork/Claude Sonnet wrapper is quite impressive all the same, no matter how great the developer experience is. Cursor is excellent software to be fair.
So what does The Eclipse Foundation have to do with this? It’s not the first name you think of when considering organisations supporting the current wave of innovation in AI tooling? I mean wasn’t Eclipse that open source Java IDE from the 1990s and 2000s? Yes it absolutely was, but the Foundation has continued to support the standardisation of open technologies, and find new niches (like automotive) to fill. [It’s also worth mentioning, though not the subject of this post, the excellent work the foundation is doing in corralling other open source foundations around security, for example helping them to come to terms with the implications of the European Cyber Resiliency Act. Further side note – if you build software you absolutely have to start paying attention to the CRA.]
Open VSX, an Eclipse Foundation project, is an open source registry of extensions for VS Code compatible editors such as Cursor and Windsurf and vibe coding tools including Bolt.
Microsoft’s position is pretty clear – you can’t use the VS Code Marketplace to enable or support products outside the Visual Studio family. So while, for example, VSCodium is a community-driven, MIT-licensed distro of VS Code, which third parties can build on, they can’t take advantage of the official marketplace. VSCodium uses Open VSX registry as its default extension marketplace, as do most other VS Code forks.
Microsoft has been fairly benign about forks of VS Code until quite recently, but with the huge success of the Cursor fork of VS Code it has begun to bare its teeth. Dion Almaer wrote about the forking issue, and Microsoft’s approach to it here.
> I want healthy competition. I want VSCode to open up more extension points so anyone can build great experiences without having to fork. I want changes to the marketplace rules so it can be more open. I want companies to be able to work together via open source so we can all gain from the rising tide (a la Chromium++).
> We are going through such an explosion in the world of development thanks to AI and the surfaces where we get to use it.
> What will be next? Will the companies with chess pieces on the board make moves that can help all? As developers what is our role to play? We can be clear on what we want to see… and we can adopt the tools that tie to our values.
Open VSX will be part of any pushback to Microsoft efforts to regain control of the situation. Amazon Web Services adopted Open VSX as the default registry for its Kiro AI IDE, which is another big win for the project. AWS recently announced it’s investing to support the Eclipse Foundation accordingly. So yes, Open VSX is in an interesting place.
As I wrote recently – Editors are up for Grabs– and the Eclipse Foundation is supporting this innovation and choice.
For those of you that are IT history enjoyers one significant irony of all of this is the original Eclipse IDE was written by Erich Gamma. He also just happens to be the original lead on the VS Code project, which began as Project Monaco, a web-based IDE in 2011. He’s still the key figurehead behind it. So an organisation founded to support a project that he wrote 25 years ago is now becoming a counterweight to what he later built at Microsoft – VS Code, one of the most successful and well-loved code editors of all time. What a towering influence Gamma has been on the world of developer tools. He really is the GOAT.
Disclosure: AWS, The Eclipse Foundation and Microsoft are all clients.
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